1) One of the characteristics of the system is that after an update, the
updated values are required to redraw web pages. (I'm a user of the
system). This probably means that the time to response will be even
longer because now the replication delay is included in the response.
The other possibility is that if the web page is redrawn using the old
values, it will appear to the user that the update has not really

occurred.

2) Would an increase of memory and cacheing help reduce response time?

syncRepl in 2.2 may address issue (1) for you. Generally we tell our
clients to wait 12 seconds to ensure the update has occurred (it usually
happens much faster than that via slurpd, but not always). A second option
is to allow just that particular application to query the master (We do
this for a very few select DN's that need immediate acknowledgment). So
far, we've been able to have those applications use our minimal index set,
so the large number of indexes issue is still avoided.

I'm not sure on 2 or not, as that would entail me having a detailed
knowledge of your current hardware, db setup, size of db, etc. It is
entirely possible.